Thursday, October 1, 2009

Genea-Musings dies - blogger goes...

Genea-Musings, Rest in Peace (somewhere!)

One minute it was there, and the next minute it was gone. Disappeared. As if it was never there. Oh, some of it is on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and the cached pages will be on Google searches for some time, but the blog itself is gone. And the archived monthly pages are hiding on more than one computer.

What happened? Well, the writer of the Genea-Musings blog worked so hard at providing content to his hundreds of readers that he filled up the allowable number of posts and images on Blogger. Screen images were probably the downfall - they take up bandwidth and Genea-Musings had thousands of them. Of Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic, Legacy Family Tree, Family Tree Builder, Ancestry, Footnote, WorldVitalRecords, and many more websites. Family pictures and record images too. They were all there, and now the images - and the text - are gone. Off to blog hell...

Two days ago, when the blog writer logged into Blogger the dashboard said that there was no Genea-Musings. What? How could that be? A futile search, and messages to the Blogger proprietors resulted in nothing but silence... and Genea-Musings was lost. All of that work. Those family pictures. The family stories and transcriptions. The endless screen shots.

After 3 years, five months, and 12 days, with 3,425 posts carefully crafted (yeah, right!) in those 1,270 days, it is all gone. Poof! Kaput! Gone. Whew!

On the second day after the loss, the blog writer decided to sell his house, put all of his genealogy papers in a repository, buy a small motor home with a satellite wireless connection, and hit the road with his lovely but neglected bride of 40 years, with a driver. The plan is to work in the databases during the drives, visit the grandchildren regularly, visit friends and relatives occasionally, travel to genealogy libraries and societies all over the country to do research and give stirring presentations about the benefits and evils of online genealogy research, and attend as many genealogy seminars and conferences as possible. Talk about the endless genealogy vacation!

In the past year, Genea-Musings has taken more and more of the writer's time - at times 10 hours a day. He has had less time to do his own research, to create and give presentations and classes, and to enjoy "real life" in San Diego, Santa Cruz and Victorville, not to mention San Francisco, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Denver, Nebraska, Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, England, Norway and other fun places to visit and do research.

So remember Genea-Musings with fond memories of that smiling, rotund, bearded genealogy blogger that no one had ever heard of three years ago, and if he comes knocking on your door please offer him a place to park, a bowl of soup and some genealogy conversation.

I've just been informed that there's been a setback for this plan - the writer of Genea-Musings was admitted today to the Geneaholic wing of the Geneabloggers Sunnybrook Farm in Salt Lake City, Utah for rest and rehabilitation. His lovely wife is there with him... trying to pry his fingers off the wornk eyboard thatk eeps makingt ypographic error sin everyp ost. He just keeps repeating "Control-C, Control-V, spell check, damn fingers, genealogical proof standard, it's not all on the internet, Ancestry is..., they're coming to take my blog away! it's Carnival time, Saturday Night Genealogy Fun rocks..."

To Genea-Musings - Rest in Peace! And have fun doing it!

/signed/
Dr. Jasia (Meitzler) (MacEntee) (Thornton) Eastman, Psychiatrist
Geneabloggers Sunnybrook Farm Staff and Family History Guru
author of "When Bloggers go mad, and other fun times"

[Note: posted for the 81st Carnival of Genealogy - topic is Your Blog's Obituary.]

4 comments:

Eileen said...

You gave me a scare until I got to the end. Good one! I kept thinking but it's not April yet...

Donde said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
QuiltinLibraryLady said...

I hope you really are joking because I enjoy reading your blog every day.

Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...

We've got parking with an electric hook-up and this time of year the soup is all simmering! I can picture you in your motor home but I do believe that Genea-Musings could (and would!) easily continue from the road.